People who call the terrorist destruction of the World Trade
Center towers an act of "cowardice" do not understand what
happened. The act is far worse than that.

Terrorists willing to die for their political convictions are
not cowards. They are fanatical idealists whose ideals are evil.
They make no make no money, gain no great fame for acts of
anonymous suicide. They die to express what they believe to be
true and moral about the world.

And they can happily murder innocent people in the process
because they define "innocence" in a totally different manner
than you or me. The WTC towers were destroyed as much by
ideology as by exploding airplanes. This is a non-trivial point.
Terrorists cannot be countered with accusations of "cowardice."
They must be taken seriously as idealists and attacked upon
ideological as well as practical grounds.

The strategy of punishing collective guilt dates back (at
least) to Bolshevik activism in pre-Soviet Russia where
communist anarchists threw bombs into crowded restaurants on the
assumption that only capitalists could afford to eat in such
establishments. Anyone who died was a member of the class that
oppressed workers. Women, children, the accidental guest,
waiters...whoever was in the restaurant was part of the problem
and guilty. The strategy was called "propaganda by deed."

Similarly, the fanatics who dove into the WTC did not believe
they were killing innocent Americans. To them, no such category
existed. Average Americans -- the woman in a grocery store, the
child in grade school, your neighbor mowing his lawn -- are
collectively responsible for every act of the American
government. Each is held personally guilty for the bombing of
hospitals in Iraq, the plight of Palestinians ...virtually every
global wrong. All Americans are guilty simply by being an
American. To the terrorists, there were no innocent people in
the WTC towers.

The burning question is whether individuals are personally
responsible for their own acts or whether they share a class
guilt based on being white, male, American, Jewish,
gay...whatever.

A man who holds individuals personally responsible for their
acts may murder. For example, he may kill his landlord or
employer. A man who believes in class guilt will kill any
andall landlords and employers, even ones he has
never met. And, so, it becomes possible for "idealists" to kill
absolutely blameless people who belong to a guilty class.

What is meant by class guilt? A class is nothing more than an
arbitrary grouping of people that is useful to the person doing
the analysis. For example, if the classifier is a doctor who
treats cancer, it would be useful for him to divide his files
according to the sex of patients in order to separate ovarian
cancer from prostate.

The last few decades have seen a surge in the political
division of people according to classes in order to ascribe
collective guilt or collective victimhood. Men subjugate women,
whites exploit minorities, Americans oppress the world. It
doesn't seem to matter what people do as individuals. The
relevant political factor has become: what class do you belong
to?

The ideal being lost here is individualism -- the belief that
each human being should be judged on his or her own actions and
merits.

Much of my life has been spent fighting for political causes,
like freedom of speech. I have argued endlessly against the use
of violence as a strategy for social change or as a valid
political statement. The people arguing against me usually held
some view of collective guilt that allowed them to dismiss as
irrelevant the possibility of innocent people being harmed.

Terrorists go one step farther. They target innocent
people. Or, rather, they define innocence in such a manner as to
include what a reasonable person would call a civilian. There
are no civilians in their war.

The terrorists will never stop. I know this because -- if I
believed in a political cause so deeply that I was willing to
die and kill by-standers -- I would never stop.

Happily, I believe in individual rights and personal
responsibility above all else. I also believe in the individual
goodness of Americans. But it is a goodness that must, for its
own safety, understand that terrorists desperately care for
"justice." But they define it in a violently different manner
that contradicts our cultural understanding...so violently
different that innocent people die.

In the justified and healthy rage that will follow the murder
of innocent, average Americans, I hope the fury is turned
against those who are individually responsible and not against
classes of people. Not Arabs in general, nor the innocent,
average citizens of other nations. To do so would only
perpetuate the vicious cycle from which terrorism was born in
the first place.